Biblical (11 page)

She watched the car approaching. She had spotted it after she had put on the coffee and turned back to the window. With only a handful of houses scattered along this stretch of back road, an approaching car more often than not signaled an impending visit. Mary watched the car as it came up North Road then took a turn onto the long driveway up to the house.

“Joe …” she called out over her shoulder. “We’ve got company …”

Mary took off her apron and hung it on the kitchen hook before making her way to the front door, again calling for Joe as she did so. She stopped at the hallway mirror to check her hair before stepping out onto the porch.

The grief hit her instantly, totally, devastatingly. As it always did.

Twenty-three-year-old newly-wed Mary Dechaud looked into the mirror and an eighty-four-year-old reflection looked back at her. For the shortest sliver of time, she didn’t recognize her reflection in the same way she hadn’t recognized herself as the sad, lonely looking old woman in the photograph on the dresser. Mary clasped her hand over her mouth to stifle her cry and the old woman in the mirror did the same. She remembered. In that instant, it all came back to her, as it always did in these painful, searing moments of recall. She turned in the direction of the study to call again for Joe, but stopped herself. Joe was not there.

Mary took a moment to look at the newspaper, neatly folded and masthead upwards on the hall stand beneath the clock, smoothed flat her skirt with hands on which she now saw the marks of age, the thickened knuckles, the blue veins beneath parchment skin, and opened the door and stepped out into the sunlight to meet her two sons, who she now remembered had arranged to come and visit. She grasped the porch rail and
leaned on it, simultaneously steadying posture and composure, quietly absorbing the impact of more than half a century suddenly remembered.

*

“No one is forcing you to leave,” said George. “It’s just that, well, the way your memory has been of late, both Jim and I think you’d be better off with someone to help you if you need help.” George, as usual, did all of the talking while James leaned back in the couch, quiet. It was odd, she thought as she poured them both coffee, how inheritances could be split like that. George looked so very much like his father – the same auburn hair and large, soft eyes – but that was where the similarity ended. James, who outwardly looked nothing like Joe, was his twin internally: gentle, caring, kind. George, in contrast, had collected traits from somewhere else in his genetic background; traits that made him pushy, aggressive, domineering. Throughout his life, George’s pleasant looks had been protection and disguise for his inner meanness. Mary knew that the expensive European car parked outside would be his – he had made his way in life by pushing others around or out of his way. He had started with his brother.

Mary thought again about Joe’s Aunt May – maybe that’s where George got his character, or at least part of it. She felt a rising panic when she remembered how she had puzzled over the tarnish on Aunt May’s newly gifted candlestick when it had really sat on the same table, in the same place, for sixty years.

“What do you think, James?” she asked her older son.

“I worry about you here too, Mom. There’s no one around for quarter of a mile. If you fell, or got confused …” James stumbled over the last part. Mary’s memory – the increasingly long periods where the distant and the long-ago became the immediate and present – was the reason for her sons’ visit.

“But this is our house … your dad’s and mine.” Mary checked herself when she started to look in the direction of Joe’s study.
They were looking for signs, she knew that; small indications of her losing her marbles.

“Dad’s been gone fifteen years, Mom.” James leaned forward, placing his hand on hers. “You’re all on your own here and we worry about you.”

“I’m just fine.” She smiled. He was a good boy. She tried to recall whom it was he had married and who his children – her grandchildren – were, but couldn’t remember. “I know I’ve problems with my memory, but that’s just getting older, that’s all.”

“What day is it, Mom?” asked George in that nasty, insistent tone he used. “Or month? What year is it, Mom?”

She answered him, giving the exact day and date. In the same way she had a notebook with the names of the current and last three presidents, Mary had a newspaper delivered every day and left it beneath the clock, masthead up, on the hall stand next to the door. Should someone come, she could tell them the time, the day and the date. All she had to do was remember for as long as it took them to ask. Her sons, and sometimes George’s wife, a hard-faced, pushy woman whose name escaped her, had called regularly of late, and Mary had the feeling of constantly being tested. She had developed strategies to disguise her memory’s increasing flaws.

“We’ll leave you these to look at.” George laid three brochures, all gloss, dark Florida tans and bright denture grins, on the coffee table. “Will you at least think it over?”

Mary told them she would. Something sat leaden and dull in her chest: despite all of her strategies, all her protests, she knew that her memory was getting worse. A lot worse than either of her sons imagined. No one knew about the long periods she spent living in her past, unaware it was not her present.

“I’ll think it over,” she said, taking the brochures and coffee cups and setting them in the kitchen.

*

She stood at the kitchen window and watched George’s expensive car glide down the drive, out onto North Road and back towards town. Her heart remained heavy as she watched the sun sink lower in the sky, repainting the canvas of forest-covered hills with a warmer palette. She couldn’t go on like this. She knew she’d have to leave her home of sixty years and would never again stand at this window, looking out over the hills and fields.

She’d phone James in the morning. Not George, James.

*

The strangest sensation came over her in the space of a heartbeat. Suddenly dizzy, Mary had to steady herself by gripping the sink’s edge. An indistinct, motiveless panic stirred as she was seized by the most powerful feeling of déjà vu she had ever experienced. Her heart picked up pace as she was gripped by a fear that she was having some kind of attack. A stroke. Closing her eyes, she took deep breaths, forcing herself to be calm.

She opened them again.

The sunset was now midday sun. So bright it hurt her eyes. Spring was now summer. She straightened up from the sink and looked out over her favorite view. It was still her favorite view, but it was changed.

It was changed back.

There were more trees and fewer fields: thirty years back, a large part of the forest fringing the road had been cleared to extend the Fisher farm and planted with alfalfa. The forest had restored itself, full and dark and complete, reconquering lost ground.

“Oh dear, no …” Mary said to the empty kitchen. She knew she was back in the past. Her condition must be getting worse and she had sunk back into distant memories as her mind slowly and inexorably folded in on itself.

But that wasn’t it. She remembered everything.

Mary remembered that James and George had just been here,
that George had driven up in his fancy European car, that they had left the brochures for her to look at, and that she had decided to leave her home of sixty years so that her body could be looked after while her consciousness, her awareness of the world, slowly evaporated.

She reached over to where she’d laid down the brochures, but they were gone. The coffee pot she had bought ten years ago was gone too, and had been replaced with the old one she had used all her married life until the pale blue enamel had all but flaked to nothing. Except someone had re-enameled it and it shone like new. She looked around the kitchen. Everything had been changed: decades of replacement undone, originals returned to their place and the kitchen gleamed with new–old stuff.

This was no trick of her mind. She wasn’t wrapped up in her own memories and recreating the past. This
was
the past.

Mary crossed through the dining room on her way to the front door, stopping to check the ugly candlestick Aunt May had given her and Joe sixty years ago. The tarnished fleck on the neck of the candlestick was gone and the silver gleamed flawlessly. What was happening? She could understand her earlier confusion: her mind turning back time while the things around her remaining objective proofs of her true chronology; but this time it was her mind that remained anchored in reality while everything around her had changed.

This wasn’t her. This was the world. Something was happening that had nothing to do with her memory problems. Something was really happening to the world around her …

Mary heard a voice calling her name. A voice that had lived only in her head for the last fifteen years. She ran through to the hallway and made to open the door but suddenly froze, her hand on the unturned handle. The mirror was to her right.

She turned to it.

Mary Dechaud, the eighty-four-year-old woman, looked into
the mirror and a twenty-three-year-old girl, slim-waisted and lithe, with thick dark-blonde hair framing a pretty, girlish face, looked back at her. Mary lifted her hand in front of her face and examined it, first the palm, then the back. Clear, unblemished, unwrinkled skin; long, slender fingers.

The voice outside called again and she threw open the door, running out onto the porch and waving to the young man with auburn hair and an easy expression as he made his way up from the road end where Dave Gundersson always dropped him off after his shift at the quarry.

It was Joe.

It was Joe smiling and waving as he came home.

*

When it was over, when the déjà vu subsided, the sky darkened and the world – and her reflection in the mirror – restored itself to the present, Mary sat in the living room and thought about what had happened. She didn’t try to make sense of it, just thought about the experience itself. The wonder of it.

After an hour or so, Mary Dechaud picked up the phone and called James. She told him gently and calmly that she had decided she was, after all, going to stay in her own home. She would remain there until the day she died; the day she would be with their father again.

Once she had hung up the phone, Mary tried to remember why it was she was in the dining room. It must have been because she meant to dust the photographs on the dresser, because she couldn’t remember the last time she had dusted them.

She started with the silver frame with the gilt edging.

Corbin phoned Macbeth the next day, relaying the information the police and the hospital had given him. After further extensive surgery, the priest was back in ICU — it was by no means certain that he would pull through and his survival thus far had been attributed to Macbeth’s actions at the scene.

“By the way,” said Corbin, “the jumper … his name really was Gabriel. Gabriel Rees. He seems to have been some kind of academic high-flyer. Shit …” Corbin cursed his clumsiness. “I didn’t mean it like that. Poor bastard.”

“I know you didn’t. High-flyer in what?”

“Particle physics. Doctoral postgrad at MIT. Isn’t that your brother Casey’s field?”

“Yeah,” said Macbeth. “Maybe Casey knew him. I’ll ask when I see him later today. Did the police tell you anything else?”

“Just that he’d no history of mental illness or drug abuse. Not on record, anyway. Exceptionally bright, though. Superhigh IQ; but there again, that’s pretty much par for the course in that field.”

“I guess,” said Macbeth, thinking about how his brother shared his IQ, but had been gifted with an infinitely more elegant, more graceful mind.

There was a pause then Corbin said tentatively, “Listen John, what I told you last night … about the house … do you think I’m crazy?”

“No, of course not. What you experienced sounds like the
same thing patients have been presenting, just like you said. Maybe it really is viral in origin.”

They chatted for a while before Macbeth rang off with a promise to keep in touch. He hung the ‘Do not disturb’ sign on his hotel-room door and lay on his bed for most of the afternoon, staring up at the ceiling, trying not to listen to sounds from beyond the room or think much about anything, and least of all about the events of the previous night.

Eventually his tiredness overcame him and Macbeth fell asleep.

“This is a dream,” a voice he recognized told him, even though he couldn’t see who had spoken.

“I know that,” he replied, unconcerned. “I know I am dreaming. I always know when I am dreaming.”

Macbeth found himself standing outside a house and he knew he was in Beacon Hill. It was one of those grand five-story Colonial terraced townhouses with the bay fronts and white stucco around the doors and windows. Louisburg Square … he was standing in the street at Louisburg Square. Behind him, he knew without turning, was the little manicured private park with the small statues of Christopher Columbus and Aristides the Just.

He dreamed he stood outside the house on a cobbled street empty of cars. There was a surreal calm to the day and the unmoving air around him felt more indoors than outdoors. Walking up the steps to a front door that swung open at the slightest touch of his fingertips, he entered the main hallway. The house was still a single dwelling, not divided into condos the way many had been over the years. Macbeth knew where he was: the house that Corbin had bought. He also knew
when
he was: a different time, long before Corbin had bought the house.

Stopping at the bottom of the stairs, he rested his hand on the mahogany pommel on the handrail post, the wood feeling warm, as if alive beneath his touch, the hall bright around him.

Macbeth smiled as she came into view at the top of the stairs. Marjorie Glaiston.

She was, without doubt, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, just as Corbin had said: slender and elegant and her gathered-up hair was a rich gold color. She wore a pale cream ankle-length dress detailed in lace and with a peacock’s-eye brooch at her throat. The swirl of emerald and turquoise in the brooch complemented the dazzling blue-green of her large, beautiful eyes. She smiled at Macbeth as if she had been expecting him, her cheeks dimpling, and started to make her way down the stairs.